


Evasive Flirtation Maneuvers

by chaoticmitochondria



Series: Her Imperial Pacifism [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, F/M, Kanaya Peixes is Empress after defeating the Batterwitch, M/M, Revolution AU, Swapstuck, some background information in this piece, sorry for the mess of tags, with the help of her motley crew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-26 10:15:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14400033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaoticmitochondria/pseuds/chaoticmitochondria
Summary: "You're not the only one who remembers it that way," Karkat said, softly, so softly Sollux had to bring his head closer to catch it. He looked down at this troll he had known before he had ever known he couldn't, and burned with how bad he wanted to kiss him.He could take advantage of the moment. Why not? This was the essence of the two of them, right? If they just got carried away enough, ran fast enough ahead of their history, they could make it.Except that was bullshit, and he knew it. No amount of red honeymooning would take away the guilt and confusion always close to the boiling over whenever he tasted what it was like to get this close.--Sollux Pyrope is tired of diplomacy parties, but as long as the newly crowned Empress needs him attending, he'll be there to moderate his easily excitable  moirail, disapprove of her concupiscent choices, drink more troll champagne than necessary, and try to avoid fucking things up with a certain cranky jade-blood he may or may not be horns over fucking claws flushed for.





	Evasive Flirtation Maneuvers

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, quick cheat sheet for the bloodswaps relevant to this work!
> 
> CHARACTERS:  
> \- Sollux Pyrope: teal-blood, Her Pacifism’s High Chancellor in charge of Alternia  
> \- Karkat Maryam: lime-blood, caretaker of the Mothergrub and the caves on Alternia  
> \- Terezi Leijon: olive-blood, forest recluse who acts as a mentor to many Alternian youth  
> \- Equius Vantas: candy-blood, quiet carpenter/architect in charge of rebuilding Alternia  
> \- Kanaya Peixes: fuschia-blood, Her Imperial Pacifism, new empress of Alternia  
> \- Aradia Ampora: violet-blood, leader of the Alternian Sky Navy  
> \- Vriska Captor: yellow-blood, psionic spy extradordinare devoted to Kanaya
> 
> PLOT POINTS:  
> \- Way back when they were young, Sollux had pale feelings for Kanaya, who ultimately chose Karkat as her moirail. So that's the shared complex history of Sollux and Karkat.  
> \- All 12 Beta trolls grew up as a close group without SGRUB on Alternia. (It was partly this experience that lead the current Empress to the idea of healing her society through collaboration.) They were all involved, in some manner or form, to Kanaya’s plot to defeat the Condense and change trollian society. Now they are adults and trying to follow through on said changes
> 
> Any other questions, feel free to ask in the comments!

Sollux Pyrope was tired of diplomacy parties. He was tired of the social niceties, of the formal and informal rules he didn't have to navigate back on Alternia in his law office and not surrounded by hundreds of trolls chatting and threatening and discussing everything from the revised caste system to workplace complaints to quadrant gossip.

His moirail's latest concupiscent crush sweating rigidly next to him in complete, painful silence for the past twenty minutes did not help matters, at all. Sollux had hoped if he ignored Equius long enough, he would eventually move away. But the troll was frozen in either fear or internal belittlement, and Sollux finally accepted the fact that to get some time alone, he was going to have to start a conversation.

There were no rules against bluntness, however.

"You need to stop believing you're not good enough for her."

"What?" Equius looked so shocked by any words near encouragement, Sollux almost snorted into his champagne glass when he took another sip.

"I mean, don't get me wrong," he continued idly. "You're not." In the corner of his eye, he saw Equius' shoulders deflate just a little bit, but Sollux wasn't in the business of making him feel good. Just in telling the truth.

So he forced himself to add, "In my opinion, no one is." He took a larger sip to avoid looking at the other troll. "But if she thinks so, you might as well have the decency to believe her. And maybe, if you're lucky, I'll believe her too."

Equius couldn't seem to find an emotion to settle on. He gave Sollux an abrupt bow. "Thank you, sir."

Sollux waved his fingers vaguely in the direction of somewhere the fuck away from him. "Yeah, you're dismissed."

Equius, sweat beading on his brow, made one more brow before escaping to the drink table and a safer vantage in the shadow of a pillar. Sollux watched him go before a familiar snicker from behind him caught his attention instead.

"You really did a number on him." His moirail slipped from the shadows to under his arm, looking up at him with those stupidly pretty eyes that showed too much knowledge than they could even physically take in. Of course she was listening. He grumbled something nonsensical, but held her close to his side anyway as she leaned into him.

They watched as various visitors started to disperse, bowing to a tired but ever smiling Kanaya. She looked genuinely pleased to see every single troll who came. Knowing her, she probably was. 

His gaze drifted over to Karkat, having a spirited argument with some troll he didn't recognize, Aradia watching on slyly over her glass. He didn't remember the last time he saw the violet-blood smile—or even her relax her face enough to hold any expression other than grave and irritated. He was painfully jealous, all of a sudden, and like the perceptive terror she was, Terezi picked up on it immediately. She looked at him. He looked back. She smiled. He finished the last of his champagne in a large gulp, and loosened his stiff collar.

"Here we go," she said cheerfully, and all too soon he was next to Aradia and his traitorous moirail had twisted out from him to skip over somewhere else.

Aradia raised an eyebrow as she looked him over. "You look like you've aged a sweep since the beginning of this party."

"Fuck you, AA." She chuckled. "What are they talking about?"

"Grub cave debate." This came from Karkat, turning to them as whoever thought it would be a good idea to invoke a conflict of opinions with the limeblood made a direct bee-line to the trolls saying their goodbyes to the Empress. "Some fucker decided to inform me about how the modifications to the cave we plan to implement would lead to overpopulation and a generation of weaker trolls that it would be a mercy to cull." He sent another scowl in the direction of the other troll. “I’m getting really fucking sick of dealing with condescending highbloods who thinly veil their teat-suckling of the hemospectrum and her Disgraced Condescension as concern for this empire.”

“Cheers to that,” Sollux agreed darkly, his mind flickering instantly to all the bulgefuckers who tried to pull the same shit in his office. Aradia made a sympathetic noise, handing him a new drink she had just swiped by a passing server troll. Sollux raised it to her in a mock toast before bringing it to his lips. It was probably what made him voice his next thought without thinking it through.

“Actually,” he said, “I’m not up to date on how it’s all going to work, myself.”

Aradia seemed startled by him raising the question right after the guy before him had been chewed out, but apparently tonight was all about loose tongues, and Sollux was genuinely curious. Karkat seemed to take it in stride, switching the tone of the conversation as if his face wasn't still flushed from yelling at the first guy.

"Modifications to the caverns won't actually increase the survival rate of grubs who wouldn't be able to make it out before," he explained, brow furrowed as he looked down at the drink Aradia had passed him right after resupplying Sollux. "But it will increase the survival rate of grubs who are perfectly healthy and fall ill to the perils of grubrot, or from in-fighting for lack of resources. Most importantly, it's insuring a young troll's developing mind won't automatically associate survival with having to have killed or injure another. It’s surprising how many things we pick up on that small." Karkat huffed a small laugh, before finally looking up at Sollux and giving him a wry smile. Sollux felt like a thief for getting a share of that private little grin. "Sometimes I think the older we get, we just get stupider."

"When you get a grub that can figure out a system of management for my office, call me," Sollux deadpanned. Karkat laughed.

"I already have one in mind. I'll ask her if she's busy and let you know," he teased. Sollux couldn't for the life of him remember when he had started smiling, but it felt as good as strange. There was just a moment of them grinning at each other, stupider than grubs and unburdened by the lines between them.

"I've never visited the caverns," Aradia mused. Fuck. Sollux had forgotten she was there. But she didn’t seem to notice his small startle, wrapped up in her own thoughts. "I don't even know if I remember what they look like."

"You wouldn't, everything was dark as shit," Sollux drawled, regaining his balance in the familiar territory of dry sarcasm. "How do you think Terezi managed to beat the rest of us out?"

"I heard that," he heard her holler. "She heard that!" echoed Vriska. Aradia turned around and her lips thinned. The two interrupters were both clearly just a touch past tipsy, laughing with their arms draped over the other in some corner.

Vriska seemed to catch onto Aradia's irritation, and a saberbeast-toothed grin stole over her face. "Hey, Terezi," she said loudly, winding an arm behind her.

"Yes, Vriska?" Terezi replied at the same volume, adopting an identical sharp smile as both of them stared straight at Aradia.

"What quadrant are we again?" Aradia rolled her eyes.

"No quadrant!!" Terezi hollered, lifting her glass.

"Too bad looks like I'm going to give you a biiiig smooch--" and she squished her lips to the olive-bloods cheek before giving her a raspberry, causing them both to collapse back into laughter. Aradia was blushing, and her earfins pinned back.

"Excuse me," she said darkly, and left to find something to distract her from the heretical flagrance of quadrants that Vriska especially loved to shove in her face.

"You didn't mind that?" Karkat asked wryly, as they watched Sollux's moirail drape herself on Vriska's shoulder. Sollux was surprised by his own laugh when she blew a kiss his way.

"Terezi and Vriska are beyond quadrants," he said, shaking his head. "Believe me, they tried, and none of them worked. I think this is the happiest I've seen them together. Anyway, she's of no mind to try and manage Vriska, and I know for a fact she has another troll romantically on her mind, conveniently here and within brooding distance."

Karkat craned his neck to see Equius at the far back. "She's trying for his red quadrant, right?"

"God knows, the poor bastard," Sollux shrugged. And like the loose-tongued idiot he was tonight, he continued, "Besides, are quadrants really that important?”

Karkat looked up at him sharply, but there wasn’t any sort of reprimand in his scrutiny. Sollux licked his lips and continued, despite the warning bells going off in his mind around discussing quadrants of all things with this troll of all trolls in particular.

“I mean, don't you find it strange? That it just took one incredibly stupid clusterfuck of barely adult-molted trolls to overthrow an ancient Empress in one move? That the Condense, for all her enforced procreation, didn't have even one quadrant of her own?"

Karkat threw his hands up. “Exactly!” he exclaimed, looking at Sollux like he was seeing him for the first time. “That’s what I’m talking about, with the caves." His hands started waving around for emphasis. "We teach them to distrust and hurt the trolls around them from practically out of the Mother Grub herself. We have no records of any other system before her Disgraced Condescension rose to power, just hundreds of years of needless death and hemospectrum worship.”

“Because it set the rules for survival,” Sollux finished. Karkat nodded, seeming to deflate a bit in the heavy silence that followed. But maybe Karkat was feeling the effects of the drinks as well, because he then continued in a subdued voice,

“I wish I knew when it started becoming integral to our society that in order to get along, we had to box ourselves into touch-starved kids, afraid of losing someone if we said we loved them the wrong way." 

Sollux’s hands twitched by his sides. He compromised with the urge to slide close enough to pull him into his arms. His heart ached with pulsing thumps as he watched the weight of the world forced Karkat’s posture into a retreating slump. He cast about for something to say, something comforting, something optimistic, like he had an ounce of comfort or optimism in him.

What a laughable thought.

But if there was something he could do, it was show Karkat he wasn’t the only one haunted. Sollux took a deep breath for courage, tipping his head up to look at the ceiling.

"Sometimes,“ he said hesitantly, “I feel like I’m the only person who remembers that day. All of us standing there, 12 kids with nasty knives looking down at the dead body of the most powerful being in the universe, waiting for the world to thunder down around us. I mean, that's how we did it. All 12 of us. Alliance without quadrants. Both everything we were never taught, and absurdly obvious." His words were picking up momentum, and though he couldn't stand to look down, Sollux could feel the intensity of Karkat's attention.

“I think about it all the time,” he confessed, clenching his hands into fists. “Because I have no idea how we did it, and a part of me just refuses to believe it."

Suddenly, it was like the floodgates had opened. He couldn’t stop talking now if he wanted. “Like, we're up against the baddest, toughest encryption system in the galaxy, and we just happen to input one password, and suddenly: congrats, you did it!" He threw his hands up. "The witch is dead!"

A hand reached up to touched his wrist, bringing it down gently, as if a question, and Sollux stopped trying to stop himself and wound his hand around it, interlocking their fingers. He hadn't realized he was trembling. Part of him was urging him to shut up, already, idiot, but now he’d gone this far, he couldn’t stop.

"I thought we were on a suicide mission. I thought, hell, might as well go down fighting. Then I was guaranteed not to live through the experience of losing any of you."

The hand in his tightened. If he looked at it, it would go away, so he steadily kept his gaze upwards.

"But you didn't." Karkat said softly.

"No, I didn't. We lived, and we inherited this mess like we wanted, and every day I wake up waiting to hear that Kanaya was assassinated and Vriska's lost it, or Tavros and Aradia managed to actually kill each other, or Gamzee lost his shit and half of Alternia is gone. And that'll be it. We were wrong, we put in the wrong password, and the world just took its time to come smashing down around us because we dared to have this stupid belief we could change things--"

"Sollux." He didn't want to look. Karkat pulled him gently backwards, into the shadows, and said his name again. "Sollux, fucking look at me, goddamnit."

He looked. Karkat's eyes were brilliantly green, and filled with a feeling he couldn't name but felt beating in his chest and throbbing in his temples. Karkat pressed their shared hand against his chest.

"You're not the only one who remembers it that way," he said, softly, so softly Sollux had to bring his head closer to catch it. He looked down at this troll he had known before he had ever known he couldn't, and burned with how bad he wanted to kiss him.

He could take advantage of the moment. Why not? This was the essence of the two of them, right? If they just got carried away enough, ran fast enough ahead of their history, they could make it.

Except that was bullshit, and he knew it. No amount of red honeymooning would take away the guilt and confusion always close to the boiling over whenever he tasted what it was like to get this close.

"The thing is," he said quietly, staring determinedly at their clasped hands to avoid the other troll's eyes, "that day was also the day I realized I would never be able to attain what you swept away with so easily.” Karkat startled, recoiling back. But he didn't let go of Sollux's hand, at least.

"What the fuck—why are you bringing that up now?"

"Because I can't pretend to be someone I'm not to you." He said, simple and honest, suddenly desperate for Karkat to understand. “I am a troll who for all his pale feelings for Kanaya, never fought for her, and I don't think you ever understood why." The other troll opened his mouth to retort, but Sollux pushed ahead, determined to see this trainwreck through. "I understood it all of a sudden, in that moment. That it was you, it would always be you, and never me. Because you believe in her. Believe in this. And all I do is want to, and like the selfish bastard I am, want the people who do too."

There. Silence. Sollux closed his eyes for a moment, wishing rather inappropriately that he could press Karkat's warm hand to his cheek.

"Sollux-" Fuck, he sounded angry. Sollux had used up the last of his restraint and responsibility to get to this point. He restrained a flinch.

"I'm sorry, Karkat," he said, letting go of his hand and turning away. His head hurt and his heart hurt and he really just wanted to retire to his stupid guest suite and lay down in the dark and hope the incoming migraine was bad enough he wouldn't have to focus on this massive dumpster fire.

"Oh hell no." Sollux stumbled as his weight was unceremoniously tugged backwards so hard he was blinking away sight spots.

"You asshole, we're all selfish." Karkat seethed, tugging him further forward by his stupid fancy lapels. There was no personal space between them, and Karkat was pissed as hell but that didn’t stop Sollux's entire body from being distracted by how close they were. He really needed to pay attention to what Karkat was saying before he was probably eviscerated.

"You're so evasive,” Karkat seethed, “and you think you're so clever, evading every issue before it comes up, trusting your masochistic tendency to emotionally buttfuck yourself so hard I have no idea how Terezi puts up with you, but how you feel isn't something you can have prevented, you absolute pusstain." Where before there was gentle support, there was now a bubbling rage that sounded harsher than the way Karkat wasn't letting his claws puncture Sollux's clothes or skin.

"I don--" Sollux tried weakly, but Karkat stopped him before he even finished the thought.

"No, shut up. I'm talking now, and there is only one thing I need to know. Is it me or Kanaya?" His eyes were two forest fires, drilling Sollux to place, drying his throat.

"What?"

"You keep saying you're selfish. Is it because you want me, or Kanaya? Fuck the past. Now, in this moment," he demanded. "What do you fucking want so badly that you're not allowed to have?"

How could he not know? "You," Sollux rasped. "Of course it's you."

And oh. They were kissing. Karkat was kissing him. Karkat was leaning into him and their intertwined hands were on his face and Sollux was gathering him even closer, like he could absorb this stupid troll boy if he just got close enough, his arms around Karkat's waist and Karkats nose against his and Sollux kissed him and the world was thundering down around him, like he was afraid it would, but Karkat was kissing him and he didn't care.

"I love you," he whispered in between kisses. "Fuck, Karkat, I don't think you understand--" he stilled them for a second. "Me," he emphasized. "Paranoid, pessimistic, the furthest from matesprit material in this goddamn galaxy." Karkat just rolled his eyes and went back in for more kissing, but Sollux held him back, grunting in frustration. He knew he wasn't making much sense, but with all the kissing and emotional exhaustion, he couldn't really be blamed, and it was really really important he bailed either of them out before it was too late.

In the meanwhile, Karkat had gotten antsy, pressing little kisses on his collarbone, which really wasn't helping. Sollux tried again helplessly, "I'm a liability you don't need--"

"What if you're a liability I want, huh?" Karkat murmured back, nipping at his mouth. He must be actively trying to kill him, Sollux decided hazily. He was trying his fucking hardest and he was losing badly. "Did it ever occur to you that this isn't just about how you feel?" Two more kisses, three. Ten. Fifty. Sollux was drowning. His heart was pumping red, Karkat's soft lips pulling little purrs and trills he thought he was incapable of making, high off every noise Karkat made right back.

After an indefinite amount of time, Karkat was the one who held Sollux back, pushing their foreheads together and demanding his gaze.

"You're not holding up the goddamn Empire by yourself," he said hoarsely. "You're not going to lose any of us because of some fucking bullshit backwards karma. You're a superstitious piece of shit who's led me on for sweeps because of your own self-loathing, and I love you too, so just fucking shut up and stop making this so complicated."

"You love me," said Sollux, unable to stop the slow smile creeping on his face. Karkat groaned and gently bonked his head against Sollux's chest in aggravation. "Okay," Sollux continued, feeling giddy and light and unable to keep it out of his voice. "I'll keep it under advisement. But only because you love me."

"That's fucking right," Karkat grumbled, and when Sollux leaned down to kiss him again he finally felt free.

\---

\-- Terezi Leijon (arsenicCatnip) began trolling Kanaya Peixes (cuttlefishCuller) --

AC : ~ mission status: th3y'v3 b33n making out b3hind that pillar for th3 last 40 minut3s  
CC : Perfect.  
AC : ~ >:3c  
CC : Or Shall I Say: Purrfect?  
AC : ~ >:Dc


End file.
